 Students, we are talking about the phases of mergers and acquisition and in that we are talking about HR challenges that take place in each of these phases. In this topic, we are going to talk about the HR implications for the integration planning phase. You can see in this diagram that this is the third phase of the M&A merger and in this integration planning phase, different HR activities are chalked out. You know that integration planning is when you have actually completed your due diligence phase in which you have looked at different alternatives and options and then you have finalized by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and in integration planning you actually chalk out the plans for the integration effort. So in HR, particularly in the HR department, what you specifically need to do or what is recommended to be done in the HR domain is that first of all developing employee culture-sensitive communication strategies. Now you have to be very much careful that you are merging two cultures together and cultures when they merge, the basic issue that comes up is regarding how the two cultures communicate. Not just verbally but also non-verbal communication. So you would be concerned about how to show respect, you would be concerned about how to show power, you would be concerned about what level of formality or informality should be in the both cultures. And that needs to be communicated in a culture-sensitive way. So if you are going to establish an organization in China for example, so Chinese culture is very much restrictive, they're not too much expressive, they're formal and they like to do things in a structured way. So if you are going to establish an organization in China, you have to maintain the cultural sensitivity over there in order to be successful. And the second thing that you need to do in the integration planning phase is to design key talent retention programs. So you want to retain the talent, you want to retain talent in the acquiring firm as well as retain talent in the firm that is being acquired. So how you are going to retain that talent, what is going to be the staffing strategy at that level, what is going to be the compensation strategy, what is going to be the appraisal strategy for retaining the talent in your organization and how you are going to manage knowledge transfer and talent management in your organization. You need to chalk out that in the integration planning phase. Then another thing that is very important is that you need to plan how you're going to lead your organization, who is going to be your leader, how they are going to communicate to the employees, how they are going to establish their authority. Is it going to be authority in a bureaucrative way? Is it going to be authority in an informal way? What is going to be the control mechanisms? How you are going to establish who is the leader? That is another very much important aspect of HR in the integration planning phase. And then you need to develop an entirely new strategy of HR regarding all the aspects of HR in the new entity. You need to forget what you were doing in your previous country. You need to forget what people are doing in the current country right now because you have established an entire new entity and you need to see how they mix together and then after mixing together what is going to be the formation of that new entity and how that is going to look like and according to that you need to make the entire HR strategy for the new entity. Another very much important aspect of HR challenge is to help the organization cope with the change process. The change management is a very important aspect of human resources and that is very much relevant to the mergers and acquisitions because that is a business situation in which the maximum amount and magnitude of change is taking place. So the HR managers, they need to make sure that the change management process is well taken care of. And finally in the integration planning phase, you need to define an organizational blueprint and staffing plan. So you need to, what is the meaning of the blueprint, what is the organizational structure of the organization, the informal structure, the mechanistic structure, the organic structure, what will be the blueprint and how you will allocate the staff's roles and responsibilities. So what is going to be your staffing plan according to that organizational blueprint. So these are the various different activities or challenges of human resource during the integration planning phase.